At 6 a.m. on weekday mornings, Margarita Solita Sorto rouses her four children from slumber. Like the other 20 families sleeping nearby, her kids begrudgingly wake in the Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 school gymnasium before receiving a breakfast of oatmeal, bananas and milk.
Two months earlier, Solito Sorto and her family’s two-week emergency hotel shelter voucher had expired, causing them to join Faith in Action to ask the public and city for a place to sleep. Solito Sorto’s son’s teachers showed up at the parking lot of a single-room occupancy hotel in support and, by the press conference’s end, they’d landed a spot at the emergency family shelter at Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8.
Her kids are considered “newcomer” students, those who recently immigrated and are plopped into the San Francisco Unified School District. One of their biggest challenges is finding shelter, said advocates and staff at multiple schools.
This year broke the national record for immigration encounters at the border, with some 2.5 million encounters between immigrants and border patrol, according to the nonpartisan think tank the Migration Policy Institute. Migration patterns have changed since the Biden administration ended the Title 42 policy in May, which had allowed the government to expel immigrants seeking asylum due to quarantine law, the institute report said.
Family encounters, in particular, have grown, surpassing single adult encounters in August and September, especially from Mexican or Central American families.
The effect is evident in San Francisco. Though the school district doesn’t report newcomer status, Mariel Sanchez, an employee at the Mission Education Center, said a number of family liaisons at other elementary schools have asked for her help, uncharacteristically, about newcomer resources. The liaisons seemed to think their schools have enrolled a higher newcomer student population — and many of those students are homeless.
Even the Mission Education Center’s newcomer population seems to be facing a higher homeless average, said Sanchez, who, on a recent school morning, passed out flyers to parents about emergency shelter. Almost half the students at Mission Education Center are without stable housing, Sanchez estimated. They “come with nothing,” she said.
At the shelter, ‘she’s tired all the time’
In 2018, Buena Vista and the city controversially opened an emergency family shelter for students in the San Francisco Unified School District, allowing clients to sleep on cots in the gym. The shelter’s occupancy has fluctuated over the years. In 2019, it dwindled to 5 percent, and closing up was a real possibility. By 2020, that tally climbed back to 65 percent, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
However, presently the shelter is full and overwhelmed, and many are newcomers. “We are beyond capacity,” said Buena Vista principal Claudia DeLarios Morán. “The people at the stayover program are having to be turned away, and they are living in the streets or their cars.”
Certainly, a cot is preferable to the streets, where Solita Sorto’s family stayed when they first arrived from El Salvador. Even so, Solita Sorto’s 10-year-old, Alisson Margarita Cruz, hasn’t been able to rest well. She’s constantly in a sour mood, and has headaches. “She’s sleeping through her classes, she’s tired all the time,” Solita Sorto said in Spanish. “Her health has gotten worse.”
Her normally smiling 13-year-old, Rodrigo Cruz, has been involved in fights at Everett Middle School, partly because he’s the new kid. That never happened in El Salvador. But he understands the need to start anew in the United States, Solito Sorta said, especially to escape the threats they’d received in their native country.
Sleeping just cots away in the gym each night is Cruz’s classmate, Lester López Gutiérrez. The 12-year-old hails from Nicaragua, and has excelled at school, his mother Frances López said proudly. He already has tons of friends, and “is improving in English each day.”
The hardest part for Lester is being far from his father, Lester Gutiérrez. The family crossed the border, but near the Rio Grande, Gutiérrez was detained by the Border Patrol. Mother and son successfully crossed, while Gutiérrez was detained in Texas, where he’s currently located. López’s only updates are when her husband calls; she cannot contact him herself.
“We don’t know if they’ll deport him, if they’ll let him through, or if he’ll reunite with us,” she said, choking back tears.
Lester and his father aren’t similar, personality-wise, but they’re extremely close, López said in Spanish. “They did everything together: Go to the beach, take walks, play soccer.”
Meanwhile, without work authorization, López has little money; the Buena Vista meals help, as do random $20-an-hour cleaning gigs. And, she’s stressed. Even if her husband doesn’t make it through, she has decided to stay with their growing son.
She said, “I’m gaining strength, and I keep moving forward.”
Beyond housing: English, school lunches, mental health
Aside from basic needs like housing and food, schools are rushing to provide laptops, supplies and other support for education.
Marlyn Martínez, the family liaison at John O’Connell High School, said learning English is one of the greatest challenges. Some students barely know Spanish, especially if they come from indigenous parts of Mexico or Guatemala. Martínez noted that, when she worked at San Francisco International High School, she met students who hadn’t been in school since the third grade. “They don’t know the school rhythm. Working in groups, class presentations — they’re not used to it.”
Cesar Martínez (no relation to Marlyn) dropped his 10-year-old, Melanie, off at school a recent Friday, where she joined the other Spanish-speaking kids. Like Melanie, most students at the Mission Education Center in Noe Valley are “newcomers.”
Melanie is, understandably, struggling to pick up English right now: It was only in May that she arrived from Mexico. She complains about missing her friends and the food back in Mexico, and everything’s in flux: Martínez, formerly a police officer in Mexico City, now cooks at a restaurant in the Ferry Plaza.
“We’re trying to tell [Melanie], ‘it may be complicated now, but it will be better for you in the long run,’” he said in Spanish.
Dual-immersion schools like Buena Vista help. At Mission High School, one teacher holds weekly math meetings for newcomer students to help out. The newcomer liaisons there are always available.
Mental-health resources are equally important. “I think for many of our Latinx youth, the challenges of immigration and acculturating to a new country are incredibly real. The vast majority of Latinx youth in this city are either first-generation or second-generation,” said William Martinez, an investigator with the University of California, San Francisco’s Fuerte Program, a Latinx mental health youth program. “So there is a lot of navigating of tough cultural situations, and for many, language barriers are a real issue.”
Martínez, the O’Connell liaison, who also facilitates the schools’ Fuerte Program, understands. In 2010, at 15, she moved from Guatemala to live with her dad, who arrived first. Her students at John O’Connell adjust to living with aunts or uncles, or a parent they hadn’t seen in years, and share feelings of homesickness.
At Buena Vista, DeLarios Morán said her school has invested in group and individual therapy for newcomer kids specifically. “What many schools are doing much better these days are building an internal awareness about the struggles newcomer kids could be experiencing,” she said. “They have a lot going on behind the scenes.”
Reporter Xueer Lu and editor Lydia Chávez contributed to this report.
ML has followed the complexities and the evolution of this stay-over program in a reliably accurate way. From its inception, the shelter was met with violent resistance from privileged and frightened families, their panic stoked by the deceptive reporting in mainstream media (especially the Chronicle), and it endured District attempts to sabotage it (including an effort to fire the principal). This shelter and the broad collaboration behind it is now an award-winning model for schools nationwide, and has become the subject of academic and policy studies. At least some of our homeless students, dispossessed by our government and dehumanized in the media, receive the shelter and nourishment that everyone deserves.
Annika,
I taught at SFUSD long ago.
Worked with cops (yes, it’s true) to go camping in deep Marin woods w/my SED kids.
(Severely Emotionally Disturbed)
Worked with a Social Studies teacher to create a Security force of 7 in halls and on grounds before and after school and between Classes.
John Voorhees registered the kids to vote and as my force of 300 wrote tickets in the halls …
John drafted kids to Jury Duty and to Role Player all Courtroom personnel.
Nobel Prize winner came from Berkeley to observe.
Next year district canceled everything and refused to renew my contract.
Keith Jackson (now in prison for agreeing to arrange contract murders) was the head of the School Board at the time that didn’t even inform me of their meetings about me.
In short … we have 112 School buildings and any civilized society would use the empty space to house the homeless for 12 hours a day.
Go Niners !
h.
Campers,
This is me try trying again to post a comment on a Hom story …
It’s a cut and paste of my original post which no doubt went to Spam.
I like my Spam in a can incidentally.
Annika Hom of ML on SFUSD schools as homeless shelters for families
Inbox
h brown
10:27 AM (5 hours ago)
to Bulldog, h, Rich, Joe, Angela, Daniel
Campers,
We’re paying to light and heat and the rest on these SFUSD buildings 24/7/365.
My comment:
Fantastic piece !!
ML is becoming ‘Triple A’ for the East Coast to poach.
Betting Annika ain’t long for our hood.
It is important to repeat over and over that the immigrants sleeping in SFUSD gyms are there because people who live on SF’s tallest hills and their ilk destroyed the quality of life in these people’s native countries.
In fact, it get’s worse.
Because the U.S. is still squeezing Central and South America (Mexico too) for all of their valuable resources from land (Guatemala) to oil (Venezuela has largest proven reserve in World) and copper (Chile, where we murdered Allende) …
Most of these immigrants are from countries under heavy U.S. sanctions for not handing over their land and populations for Pacific Heights exploitation.
We owe them.
Go Niners !
h.
Fantastic piece !!
ML is becoming ‘Triple A’ for the East Coast to poach.
Betting Annika ain’t long for our hood.
It is important to repeat over and over that the immigrants sleeping in SFUSD gyms are there because people who live on SF’s tallest hills and their ilk destroyed the quality of life in these people’s native countries.
In fact, it get’s worse.
Because the U.S. is still squeezing Central and South America (Mexico too) for all of their valuable resources from land (Guatemala) to oil (Venezuela has largest proven reserve in World) and copper (Chile, where we murdered Allende) …
Most of these immigrants are from countries under heavy U.S. sanctions for not handing over their land and populations for Pacific Heights exploitation.
We owe them.
Go Niners !
h.